Chelsea Flower Show 2012: Sarah Price's vision

For her first major Chelsea Flower Show garden, this year’s Telegraph entry,
Sarah Price has set herself the challenge of fusing design and nature to
evoke a vision of the British landscape. She tells Stephen Lacey her
plans.

Heavy rain had turned the paths at the Crocus Nursery in Sunningdale, Berkshire, muddy and sodden, but Sarah Price, designer of The Daily Telegraph garden at next month’s Chelsea Flower Show, was leaping the large puddles with scarcely a splash on her elegantly brogued leather boots. My own jumps were not so gazelle-like. Although admitting to a little less sleep than usual, Sarah seems to be navigating the Chelsea build-up equally effortlessly – while juggling myriad other demands on her time as one of the designers of the riverside gardens in the Olympic Park.

For her first-ever big Chelsea garden, she could hardly have made things more difficult for herself. Eschewing the structural safety net of a geometric layout, buildings, walls, box and yew topiary, or dramatically architectural plants (apart from multi-stemmed birch trees), she has gone for a wonderful, mercurial theme and a beautiful, ethereal flora. “The garden is drawn from many experiences of country walks, and family holidays on Dartmoor and in the Black Mountains,” she says. “All those encounters with plants – a drift of cowslips, a misty wood, coming across a haze of Deschampsia grass in Snowdonia. I want to distil some of that atmosphere of being 'in the moment’ with nature – something I hope a lot of people will relate to.”

Bright star: Sarah Price at the Garden Museum, London

The planting will be composed largely of British native wild flowers in “a multilayered tapestry of subtle colours”. At Crocus, some 12,000 of them are being grown for her to select from. Sarah visited to check how they were getting on. Preparing plants for Chelsea is quite a palaver. Changes in weather mean some plants are forever being taken in and out of the polytunnels to protect them or to advance or slow down their progress. Others are potted on in stages from autumn to spring to give a spread of heights and maturity. In spite of the heaters, a vicious late frost had penetrated a corner of one of the tunnels and scorched the delicate young fronds of the moisture-loving fern Onoclea sensibilis. Nursery manager Karen Sowden was optimistic that new fronds would emerge in time for Chelsea.

The question is, how do you bring a sense of design to wild-flower planting? Sarah tells me that a particular source of inspiration for her has been the Heemparks (Home Parks) in Amstelveen, Holland, which she visited in the summer of 2009 and on several occasions since.

This string of unusual urban green spaces was set out in the Thirties and Forties as a landscape of lakes, streams, woods, heaths and meadows, using only Dutch native plants. Instead of building habitats and then simply letting the plants develop into jumbled communities, the designers marshalled the plants to produce an arresting array of sculptural and spatial effects – solitary trees; woods dropping abruptly into open sunny “lawns” of creeping thyme; banks of purple betony; black waterways, with horizontal rafts of water lilies, rising into “forests” of vertical royal ferns, Osmunda regalis. Creative maintenance, with different feeding, mowing and weeding regimes, then encourages plants to colonise, interact and enhance the effects within the desired limits.

These parks, and their fusion of design and nature, have been a huge influence on Dutch designers such as Piet Oudolf, and the new wave grass and naturalistic perennial style that has engulfed us in Britain over the past 15 years or so, but only on rare occasions have I seen a contemporary designer take up native wild flowers and fine-tune them as carefully as they would border plants.

Sarah is doing just that, bringing into play not only her own observations of nature – “I have never written notes or deliberately recorded things, but I have a very good visual memory” – but also her background in fine art and abstract landscape painting. When we met, she had just come back from visiting the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy.

As we looked at the plants, she pointed up the little differences and special qualities of each species which, when carefully blended for contrast in height, shape, texture and colour, will bring an elegant rhythm to her planting.

There was the “transparency” of wild valerian with its slender stems of pale pink, scented flowers; the “dark inkiness” of rampion (Phyteuma); and the delicate rays of Tragopogon, “a detail I will need to make stand in relief for it to be noticed”.

There were all the different shades of green to be found even just among the marshland grassy plants – the pale lime of Carex acuta, the tufted sedge; the richer green of soft rush, Juncus effusus; and the metallic green of hard rush, Juncus inflexus.

Sarah Price will combine many wild flowers, such as rampion, in her Chelsea garden for the Telegraph

For her woodland area, the feathery Deschampsia grasses, D. caespitosa and D. flexuosa, will be complemented by the snowy wood rush, Luzula nivea – my favourite grass for shade, with its silvery blade hairs like cobwebs and heads of creamy flowers already emerging.

“Look at this flag iris. There is so much structure in these plants. Think of the vertical layering you can make with it, and with the sorrels [Rumex – with their slim, pink flowerheads above broad leaves].”

For her waterside planting, she has the giant horsetail, Equisetum hyemale, whose stems banded in chocolate and white will rise up tall and slender in the company of yellow marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, and the starry white-and-pink flowers of ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi. “Imagine stitchwort [Stellaria, with tiny white stars] woven into this white lychnis, or with cow parsley.”

Most of this tapestry-making she will not be able to do until she is on site at Chelsea.

“There will be a lot to do at the last minute, but I am really excited about that bit,” she says, adding how nice it was to be thinking about plants again after being immersed in discussions about rocks and pond liners.

I left her among the wild-looking birch trees, which she was just planning to have lifted out into the open so that she can determine how best to position them.

She wants them to be “in conversation” and to create an “ethereal” atmosphere among the wild flowers.

“It is an ambitious thing to try to capture,” she says. “But this is Chelsea, after all.”